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2 WESTERN LEADER, JANUARY 26, 2012
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For God’s sake, do something
How many more of this country’s chil-
dren must face violent death or injury
before people with responsibility for
their safety take decisive and urgent
action to protect them, particularly
Maori whanau – in which the crisis is
at its worst – to stop the killings and
maimings.
The pattern of suspicious deaths and
child battering and killing continues –
already one child dead this year, other
court hearings due on earlier offences.
And the dead triplet case to be solved.
If our dreadful statistics continue
that annual victim list could be 10 or
more by the next New Year – plus
hundreds more needing hospital
specialists to save them.
With these heart-breaking deaths
and injuries, pressure from worried
people grows. The demand for action
heightened after the jailing – in the
days before Christmas – of an Auck-
land mother for the prolonged torture
of her daughter, then aged eight.
She had pleaded guilty to 25
horrifying
charges
including
assaulting the girl with a machete and
a hammer, kicking her in the crotch
while wearing steel-capped workboots,
tearing off her toenail and pouring salt
and boiling water on the wound and
writing abusive words on the girl’s
body.
One charge involved assault on the
girl’s younger brother.
The justifiable definition of torture
came when Judge Brooke Gibson sent
the mother to jail for seven-and-a -half
years with a minimum non-parole
period of five years.
Judge Gibson described her mis-
treatment as ‘‘sustained abuse,
amounting to torture’’. She suppressed
the mother’s name but only to protect
the child, one of the very few times in
her life that her daughter has been at
all protected.
The facts of her life – which illus-
trate what is a national crisis – show
she was taken from her mother as a
baby and was later transferred to an
unrelated caregiver for what were
clearly her only best years.
She was then put into a Child,
Youth and Family-approved whanau
caregiver where she complained she
was sexually abused before being
passed back to her mother after years
apart.
A report from former Ombudsman
Mel Smith of an inquiry into CYF
handling of her life has simply
reinforced growing concern.
He plainly understated the obvious
–
that CYF ‘‘could have done better’’
and that the department’s methods
involved ‘‘a complicated labyrinth of
relationships, assessment and critical
decision’’.
His report called for urgent study
and action involving ‘‘kin placement’’
and concerns among professionals that
too often the wishes of a parent or
parents or whanau prevailed. In fact,
the plight of this little girl is simply
the latest revealed example of major
problems which need urgent attention
from the government – and a Maori
community and MPs appearing to
ignore a problem which too often ends
in injury or death for children who
need aroha.
Instead they are simply cash cows
providing social welfare handouts.
In the mailbag:
From Valerie Davies of Leigh, for-
mer women’s editor of the Auckland
Star and NZ Woman’s Weekly colum-
nist on family issues. She is married to
Pat Booth.
‘‘In the inquiry into Child, Youth
and Family’s incredible decisions
taken over the little girl who was
starved, tortured and terrorised by her
parents, have the following questions
been asked: ‘‘Why was the little girl
taken from her secure home when she
was four years old to be deposited with
her whanau who presumably were
strangers to her?
‘‘Was the little girl asked what she
wanted – to stay with the people who
had loved her for as long she could
remember or go to a group of people
who had no track record of caring for
her?
‘‘Why was the little girl returned to
her mother when the whanau has
abused their trust and abused her,
when the mother had already been
found unfit to care for the child when
she was born?
‘‘Do staff at Child, Youth and Family
have any training in basic ‘child psy-
chology’, covering such vital topics as
‘bonding’?
‘‘Are any checks made on the wha-
nau to discover their motives for sud-
denly wanting to parent a child after
four years of absence from her life?
‘‘Since there is evidence to show that
many whanau apply for custody in
order to get access to money paid for
the child’s upkeep, are there any
requirements to show that they qualify
as competent carers? When couples
apply for adoption I doubt that they
would be considered suitable parents if
they were unemployed. Would this cri-
teria apply to whanau?
‘‘Making excuses for torturing or
killing children should be unaccept-
able and yet already I’ve heard a com-
ment on the death of the triplet that
coping with multiple births is difficult.
It surely must be, but that’s no excuse
for killing a baby.’’
Also on record is the published evi-
dence of Carmel Claridge of
Kohimarama, who left CYF because of
concerns over its system.
‘‘Not one of the people putting up
their hands to take on the care of chil-
dren in all the files I worked on were
self-supporting. All were beneficiaries.
‘‘The care orders were simply a
means to a notch up the benefit ladder,
a means to quicker state housing, a
means to ensure continued access to
taxpayer-funded systems supposedly
in place to ensure the well-being of
children.
‘‘The calibre of these people was, to
be brutally honest, often so inadequate
I would hesitate to leave pets in their
care, much less children.
‘‘The whanau system is failing
miserably. Sadly the best thing for
many children at risk, brown skin or
white, is to get them as far away from
their ‘whanau’ as possible until those
children have had the opportunity to
experience life without abuse, violence,
poverty and welfare dependence. With-
out that they do not stand a chance
and neither do their children or their
children’s children.’’
■ Carmel Claridge is my nomination
as an expert witness in a long-overdue
campaign to save our children.